WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN

BRING ME BACK

By B.A. Paris, St. Martin’s, 304 pages, $34.99

As narrators go, Finn, this novel’s principal teller of the tale, a wealthy English investment adviser, is reliable enough, though he may be withholding some details.

At any rate, it seems he was serious about marrying a young woman named Layla until a dozen years ago when she vanished without a clue.

The years pass, and Finn, still reliable but also still somehow evasive, falls for the missing woman’s sister.

A STONE’S THROW

By James W. Ziskin, Seventh Street, 288 pages, $17

Ellie

Stone calls herself

“a modern girl.”

What that means, since the

Stone books take place in the early 1960s, is that Ellie naturally conducts herself in a manner that women of a slightly later generation would call feminist. She works as a reporter on a daily paper in upstate New York and delivers the real goods whenever a murderer is on the loose.

In the series’ latest book, somebody has bashed beyond recognition a man and woman who were somehow connected to the summer races at nearby Saratoga Springs.

Ellie’s sleuthing takes her through a whole novel’s worth of entertaining hoops.

WHAT MY SISTER KNEW By Nina Laurin, Grand Central, 384 pages, $19.49

Andrea Boudreux may be the most contrary central character in recent crime fiction. She refers to Denver, the gem of the Rockies where the book’s events unfold, as possessing “postapocalyptic hideousness.”

Does a reader want to spend time in this unappealing young woman’s company? Not really, or at least not until we find ourselves gripped in a chilling story involving Andrea’s twin brother who served a stretch in prison for killing their parents, and is now on the run.

JAR OF HEARTS

By Jennifer Hillier, Minotaur, 320 pages, $33.99

Does it really matter that there’s little mystery in a novel that falls into the genre “mystery?” Well, no, not when the novel is as sneaky smart and horrifically plotted as Jennifer Hillier’s fifth and best realized book.

The story covers 20 years in the lives of three friends. At least, they begin the tale in friendship. At age 16, Georgina Shaw, becomes obsessed with an older guy outside the trio.

This guy murders the second girl in the group, Angela Wong, and Georgina helps him bury the body.